sahmeepee

I'd very much appreciate it if you share your findings with the group I've been looking at a very similar project recently, but wasn't really planning on using it for user storage though - just backups - so manageability was slightly less of an issue. I'd looked at these Linksys NAS chassis: http://www.lambda-tek.com/componentshop/index.pl?origin=gbase26.2&prodID=1346537 which seemed like a good idea - the OS is stored in flash memory, so you don't have to waste any disk space on it. There were some pretty discouraging forum posts though, so I'm a bit wary of them now. Obviously your solution will come in a bit more pricey, but is much more scalable and has the benefit of iSCSI which the Linksys server lacks.

Also be aware that subinacl can be very fussy about you using the correct version. Presumably they changed some of the syntax slightly along the way. I scratched my head over a non-working script for quite a while before I figured that one out! NTFSFix looks very easy to use.. you'll still need subinacl or similar to fix your ownership though.

Ditto - hard to imagine life without it now.

Windirstat will show you that sort of thing visually. If you want some sort of text-based reporting you'll need to use something else though.

We've had quite a few instances where the driver tries to install itself again whilst a normal user is logged on, which it can't do because it needs admin rights. They then get repeatedly bombarded with the install screen (green progress bar on black background) until we come and fix it by logging on as an admin then logging them back on. Days later it might happen again on the same PC. It's strange because it behaves itself on most PCs and they're from an image. My current theory is that it has something to do with them disconnecting the USB cable although I'm not sure of the exact circumstances to replicate it..

I also played with Reload way back when it came out and found it way too complicated for me! I couldn't even get it to compile a valid SCORM resource back then. Since then they have released a wizard add-on for it which does make it a lot easier to use, but from a quick play with exe it seems to be much better suited to teachers. When we had classserver (3/4) the best thing about it was the content creation tool. It's just a shame that microsoft put so little effort into the back end. :?

Praise the lord, I've finally got this beast working (at least the server end of it). After much head-scratching I had it narrowed down to some sort of authentication problem. Our ISA server was set to only allowed authenticated connections which I suspected may have caused the issues, but turning that off didn't help so I fired up WireShark. That told me that the ESMServer DOESN'T TRY AGAIN IF IT FAILS TO AUTH FIRST TIME! So any subsequent login attempts are effectively discarded, even if you've made changes to firewall rules etc. I also found that it was using Basic auth, which I had disabled (all our clients use Integrated). As with all quality software it stores your proxy user/pass in plaintext in the registry and sends the main user/pass for accessing the software in plaintext across the internet (normal http/SOAP). Good job the passwords are highly secure... erm.. Obviously the only troubleshooting support the software gave me throughout my trauma was telling me my userid/password was wrong! Can we move this thread to FFS!!! so I can justify swearing?!

I wasn't aware of the inclusion of Exch2007 in the MOSS license Tony, so thanks for the info. How on earth do they calculate the price if you don't just want one Sharepoint server, one Exchange and one OCS2008? I'd imagine many LAs have pretty large Exchange setups in place already. Viglen (it's learning) were offering theirs even cheaper than 2k/yr back in January, but admittedly I haven't been in touch recently. As for pre-loaded content I think the real benefit there comes down to how many schools you can get to buy together as a consortium/LA rather than the technology it's loaded into. Our LA are in the early stages of a single sign on project at the moment and (independently of that) are looking into an LA-wide Moodle deployment, so hopefully the two will both come to fruition and work nicely together. I'm keen for schools across the LA to team up as I think it will benefit everyone long-term. From our initial meddling with Moodle it does seem to have some limitations in its overall structure though (i.e. it doesn't seem to be well-suited to a hierarchy with LA > School > Subject > Year say) Either way I'm not optimistic that they'll get their derrières in gear by Sept 2008, but I'd hope we'll get away with something usable for under 7k/year if it's being split x ways.

I use a tool called RFlow Collector with our DD-WRT firmware Linksys APs. It shows me the active APs and the clients connected to them along with signal strengths. The APs are capable of syslog and SNMP, but I have those disabled for now.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Sharepoint does not provide email and although it links into it where required you are still paying separately for your Exchange server. Also bear in mind that the LAs have a big wodge of money from the government for providing VLEs so I would expect the cost of servers to come out of that. I would say £7.5k is steep when you consider that hosted commercial implementations are available for well under £2k. In the long run overpriced offerings like these may well do damage to the overall effectiveness of VLE implementations nationwide, because like it or not a consistent VLE platform across an LA (dare I say country?) will get staff using it more effectively and will likely lead to better collaboration between schools when compared with the heterogeneous approach.

if you have a microsoft volume license (e.g. schools agreement) you should be able to download it from the volume licensing site.

I was asked to buy snagit recently but couldn't find much that it could do which we couldn't achieve with our existing software: Printscreen/alt+printscreen - capture screenshots MediaPlayerClassic - capture video stills Powerpoint - crop/resize/annotate images any more requirements?

Did you try running rsop.msc on the affected PC?

OK, I've tried to get this working, but no joy. I installed the ESM server and installation went through smoothly. Unfortunately I can't get it to accept my username and password. They work on the website so there's no problem there. It seems to be a problem with it getting through our ISA2006/Websense set up, but I can't seem to nail the problem. I've made it connect by IP address and added the IP to an allow rule in ISA and also tried setting up an allow rule with all permutations of their hostnames/IPs and http/https. When I monitor in ISA I get anonymous requests even when I have proxy credentials set in the config. When I access the same URL from a browser it shows my account hitting ISA and the connection is allowed. Has anyone else had similar problems or used ISA+Websense successfully?

We bought extra Acer laptops as you describe after finding out what a complete waste of time their warranties were. At the moment I'm tending towards HP although we have had a few imaging problems. I have a couple of Lenovo ones on order for a media studies setup, which serves as a toe-in-the-water for testing their quality.

The cheap stuff does seem to be improving -not long ago you wouldn't have seen QoS, aggregation or VLAN support on budget switches. When people are spending a fortune running fibres & cables though it seems like a gamble to put in potentially inferior switches. We have 3com kit throughout and they do have some handy management features e.g. the software will map out the live network and show network health based on a few parameters - even down to the level where it told me one of the switches had a fan on its way out. It also shows which workstations are connected on which switch ports. We can customise some of the more arcane switch settings which sometimes gets you out of a jam (e.g. configuring spanning tree and broadcast storm control). The basic point there is that you don't want to come to a point where you need to customise a particular feature that your switches have hard-coded. Being able to backup configs to a file and restore them to a replacement switch is also handy - not sure if the budget models do that yet.

Another thing you can try when you get back to school is running filemon to see which files are being accessed or not found during logoff. "But logging off will close filemon!" - you can make filemon persist across login sessions by getting it to run under the system account: Logged on as an admin: Create a folder in c:\ called monitor Copy in filemon.exe and psexec.exe from microsoft/sysinternals Create a shortcut to psexec.exe Change the shortcut command to read: c:\monitor\psexec.exe -sid c:\monitor\filemon.exe Copy the shortcut somewhere where a pupil will be able to get at it (e.g. all users start menu). Log on as a pupil then: Right click on the shortcut you made and do run as... Run it as the local administrator account Make sure it's logging everything to the window Hit log off Wait 20 minutes Log on as an admin again then: Wait for the filemon window to show up again (should appear well before login completes) Pause logging (don't delete the logs so far!) Scroll up in the window and see what it's been doing for the last 20 minutes! I can't guarantee you will fix your problem, but if it's file access related that will almost certainly put you on the right path.

i would drop a copy of rsop.msc into the all users' start menu and run it to see what policies they're getting.

We had that specific problem on some small mono laserjets. I seem to remember reinstalling the driver using the latest one from HP hit the spot.

We use them here and it works quite nicely. Our setup is basically: Block by default Path rules for exceptions Be aware that .lnk files (windows shortcuts) are classed as executables by default in software restriction policies We don't create any path rules which would allow a user to run anything from a location they have write access to. e.g. they can run shortcuts in the all users start menu, but not shortcuts/exe files in their own.

Might be worth checking you have the GDI flaw patched on your workstations: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS07-017.mspx http://www.cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2006-5758 I'm not sure what the behaviour is when it's exploited, but from the 2nd link it suggests you may see a crash dialogue.

From their point of view I can understand why they can't maintain your custom groups as skunk said above. We use a few custom groups and they mostly work well (our normal staff group is a more restrictive version of the standard capita one). The 3 areas where Capita fall down on this are: # System manager is painfully rubbish in every way. # It's often nigh on impossible to deduce which permission enables a particular function in the SIMS interface. (the permissions spreadsheet is a mapping of perms to standard groups - not perms to functions in the software) # They don't tell you which new permissions they've created in each release note so if your groups need tweaking you don't find out until something doesn't work.

I'd love to see the look on their faces if we reimaged their PCs with the software that you get on the OLPC laptops. You can download a VMWare Player of it if you're interested. The darlings might find it a tad limiting

We had a large number of iDesks installed around the time they first came out (getting on for 5 years ago now). We haven't had much in the way of problems with them although the remaining ones are getting pretty tired now. The main reason we haven't stuck with them when we replaced the suites is the lock-in to their equipment. The monitors on ours aren't on VESA mounts, so you have to buy their arm and their monitor (~£* for a normal 17" screen is the current pricing). Also the PSUs are strangely shaped small things which we haven't been able to source, so we are using cannibalised parts from the PCs we've replaced. Gwendes: they are now making monitor arms with USB sockets in them to resolve one of your problems, but I think you'll be looking at the best part of £* for a full size IT suite. Ours don't have mini switches in them and I'm glad - I'd much rather they all had proper network connections. *price estimates removed at request of idesk

TIP#1 Setting up the workstations for regular users means you will have to tweak file permissions. There are threads on here (search for simsperm or simsperm.bat) and you should be OK. TIP #2 If you're doing updates out of hours, allow for approx: 15 minutes + (number of patches to apply * 30 mins) That is unless they've managed to fix the all-new slow backup procedure. TIP #3 If there's an FMS update waiting, book a flight somewhere warm with no extradition treaties with the UK.